Speaker’s Corner
Liam Horan
IN a remote hillside village in Malawi, I met Edina Game sitting outside the tiny hut she calls home.
Edina smiled, but the smile didn’t travel far. She hasn’t much to smile about. In 2003, she was diagnosed with HIV/AIDS. She went to hospital to be treated for TB, and found she had HIV/AIDS.
Her husband died ten years ago.
At night, Edina and her three sons (15, 12, 9) sleep in a dusty corner about half the size of a back-kitchen in an Irish house. There’s no electricity or running water. When it rains, they get soaked to the skin.
She’s 40. Her village is located 29km from the nearest hospital. She needs to go there once a month to get her anti-retroviral drugs (ARVs), which can slow down the effects of HIV/AIDS.
So how does she go? Drive? She’s no car. Lift from a neighbour? The neighbours don’t have cars either. Bus? There’s none.
So she scrambles the money together to hire a pushbike-taxi, hops up on the back, this grievously ill woman, and sets off on a six-hour journey, much of it over terrain that you and I would scarcely call a road. It must be a journey of deep discomfort for a woman in her condition.
There are times when the surface is so rutted, or the hill so steep, she’s forced to get off the bike and walk, under the unforgiving African heat.
When she gets to the hospital, she queues for an hour to get her drugs. Then she sets off again on the return journey, enduring more bumping around on the back of the bike, and another 6km of walking, before finally arriving home after dark.
“She finds that journey so difficult,” Arnort Chimangeni told me. Arnort is a GOAL healthcare worker who calls on Edina to dress her bandages and bring her some succour a few times a week.
She is just not fit for the epic bike ride. But she has no options. The ARVs can only be picked up in person. Without them, she would be much sicker.
Yet, Edina Game is one of the lucky ones. At least she gets her ARVs.
Half a mile away as the crow flies, Namareta Magola doesn’t get her drugs. She’s much sicker. She has HIV/AIDS, too, but she can’t even afford the bike-taxi.
So she goes without her ARVs. She’s 43, but looks much older. Her own house fell to rack and ruin since her husband died four years ago, and now she’s back living with her mother.
According to GOAL health workers, her condition is deteriorating rapidly.
This is the cutting edge of Africa’s AIDS epidemic. This is how it spins out beyond the headlines and the reports. Some get their ARVs. Others don’t. It can be as random as whether or not you can rustle up the cash for a bike-taxi.
In Malawi alone, it is estimated that 900,000 people live with AIDS – about 14 per cent of the population. In the region I visited, over 2,200 people live with HIV/AIDS in a cluster of just 23 villages.
GOAL, and other humanitarian organisations, are advocating that local health centres should be permitted to distribute ARVs, but that hasn’t come to pass yet. And so people like Namareta can’t make the journey for her ARVs, and her condition worsens.
Two days later, in another remote village nearby, women danced and cheered as the two GOAL jeeps pulled up. GOAL is building 100 houses that will house young people orphaned by the HIV/AIDS epidemic.
They will live in these houses, in their own communities, with their guardians. It gives them dignity after all they’ve been through.
“This man is a reporter from Ireland,” the man from GOAL tells the chairperson of the local community organisation.
“All I ask you,” she says, looking me square in the eye, “is when you go home, put our village on the map. Don’t let people forget us.”
Liam Horan travelled to Malawi with GOAL. The names of the two women living with HIV/AIDS have been altered to protect their identity.
